I have been blogging for a couple of years now and during those years I have discovered many great blogs. As a blogger I think it is very important to read and comment at other blogs. I think it is one of the fun things about blogging, that sense of community and talking to likeminded people. There is one problem though: the total amount of blogs I’m following. I have not counted them, but I would not be surprised if there are at least 40 or 50 I subscribe to. The reason I started subscribing was because it was impossible to start visiting all the blogs, especially if some were not updated. Subscribing offered me a way to receive every new blog post through mail and read and respond on the ones I like.
If you follow so many blogs however there is a very big flow of emails hitting your inbox and it is normal to get 20 to 30 mails per day, which I do try to keep up with, but I started feeling like I’m always falling behind with a full inbox staring me in the face. A couple of weeks ago I decided to change my reading behaviour and set up some filters on my Gmail. Every mail from each blog is now automatically tagged and stored and archived, so I can read all the new blog posts from one specific blog and my inbox stays as good as empty. Although I still get the same amount of mails I do not see them immediately. The advantage of that is that I do not feel as pressured to read each and every mail as they enter my mailbox. To keep up I select a couple of those archived folders and work through all the mails from that blogger. I really prefer this way of reading new blogposts now even if it means I’m sometimes late to respond.
So I’m wondering how you do it and if there are maybe some other efficient ways to read other blogs you might use:
How do you keep up with reading and responding to all the blogs you follow?
I want to know how you set the filters because I feel totally buried. I barely have time to write … and there’s all this stuff I really DO want to read, but I’m lucky if I get to skim it. That’s probably not very helpful.
In Gmail it is really easy, just create a search term (usually based on the name of the blog which is mentioned in either the subject or from field), test if that works as you want. Then press the arrow down next to your search term and select “Create filter with this search “. Then select “Skip your inbox” and apply a label to it. Hope that’s clear enough.
Google Reader is my friend. I couldn’t make without it. Since they’re shutting it down this coming summer, I’ll need to find myself another feedreader or I’ll have to cut down on my blog reading radically.
So none of the ones you have tried worked as you would have liked? Would be a shame if you won’t be able to read as many blogs anymore.
I haven’t tried them yet. As far as I understand it there are several in development, so I’m waiting another month before settling for one. It’s leaning towards the paid service Old Reader, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.
Try the ones suggested, there are some really nice ones there…
Yep, I also use Google Reader, so I’ve been sad that it’s going. I’ve moved my subscriptions over to the Old Reader now, and it’s free (unless there’s a paid version I don’t know about?), though sadly doesn’t have an app so it’s not so easy to check from my phone. I just check it a few times a day, and if a post I like comes up, I click through and read it in full.
Thanks for your comment Ewan!
I am like you, hate having my mailbox full. I do it old-school, visit the sites I like every day. 🙂
I wish I could, but I simply don’t have the time to do so 🙁
I created my tyson email purely for blogging. So I subscribe to the sites I like and visit them from my inbox when I get the notification. Normally in one big sweep, doing about 50 sites at once 🙂
Wow, that’s some heavy commenting! I’m already having trouble with writing blog posts with the frequency I do, so catching up with other blogs is very hard which I wish I could change. Then again I don’t want reading and commenting start to feel like it’s work, it has to be because it’s fun and love to do it.
I try to like each post from the blogs I follow. I don’t always get around to every blog, but try to for most.
I try to at least as well if there is a possibility, since blogger doesn’t have the option.
I like your technique and I am going to setup those filters.
The way I have been doing is as follows:
The e-mails that go to my victorsmoviereview.com e-mail I read the same day. There are only a few–yours being one–that get notified to that address. Originally when I setup the blog it was before I setup the blog e-mail, and I inputed my personal e-mail address.
As for my personal e-mail, that is the one that gets flooded. When I get time during the week at night or weekend early in the morning, I work from newest to oldest filtering by the blogger. So, if “Stories by William” is the first blog I filter to see all his e-mails. I go to the most recent post and then go through all the posts to the last one I read. When I’m back on the filtered In-Box I delete all the e-mails.
The negative/positive side of this is when I get swamped with work and/or a lot of outside activities. It may go two to three weeks before I can actually go through the e-mails. At that point it is too much for me to go through them all. This forces me to really consider which blogs I enjoy following and make changes to what I follow.
So you usually also have a backlog. Happy to see I’m not alone on this. Do try the filters, it made things feel a whole less busy to me while still being able to read it all at my own pace.
Nostra, that is a good idea and I should totally start subscribing and setting up my gmail features.
What I have been doing is adding blogs that I read with regularity to my blog roll so I have a reference for myself. I also try to check out any blog that leaves a comment on our blog. Somedays it seem like I spend more time reading and commenting on other blogs than I do writing. 😉
Yeah, you should try it, it really helps and it takes away the pressure of having to keep up. I now don’t feel the need to immediately start reading and bloggers don’t mind when you respond a bit later to something they’ve written.
I follow well over a 100 blogs so inevitably some won’t grab my attention and I decide to leave it. It’s nothing personal to that blogger. I simply don’t have the time to visit everybody. What I’ll normally do is make a point of visiting a site, that I haven’t been giving much love lately and remind them that I’m still around and still keeping an eye on their stuff. For the most part, I still read as many as I can but I don’t always leave a comment.
Yeah, I sometimes pick and choose as well, I simply can’t read everything, unless I make it a full time job 🙂
Really good question, I read them as they come in. Like or Comment on as many as I can. I agree though it can get overwhelming!
Impressive, I even can’t always keep up with responding to comments, although I try to do it as soon as I can.
I try to read most of them within a few days of them hitting my inbox. But sometimes I’ll admit it gets to be too much and I’ll do triage. If 10 different bloggers are all reviewing the same movie, I’ll read the ones who I think usually have the more interesting takes, and I’ll skip the others. I don’t really like doing it, but there simply isn’t enough time to read everything and still do everything else I need to do.
I can understand that…I usually skip reviews of movies I have not seen yet, or just peak at the score to see if it is worth checking out.
I’ve been following this post as I am very interested in what other bloggers have to say. I find “keeping up” incredibly difficult and more so over the past 3 months than ever before. I usually use wp reader, but it, of course, does not give me the feed of non-wordpress blogs. On my day off I try to sit and go through all those who have commented and see what they are up to. I recently eliminated my blogroll as it kept staring me in the face as a list of places I feel bad never staying up to date with. I want to catch up with so many but run out of time so much lately.
thank you for posting this question. and thank you to all who have answered. I appreciate the candidness and the tips! 🙂
You are not the only one with the issue of trying to “read it all” 🙂
I did away with my blogroll a while ago as well, because like you said it is hard to keep it up to date. Hope you’ll be able to get some good suggestions out of the comments!
Well honestly I have trouble keeping up these days. Usually I can read them everyday, but now perhaps only per 3-4 days. I usually read them via Google Reader or Feedly, but it’s hard to find time to comment sometimes.
I’d love to subscribe e-mail but sometimes they don’t view it fully and must click ‘visit the website’ so I rarely subscribe. I’d prefer visit them when I can.
It seems the longer you blog, the more difficult it gets to keep up as you keep reading more and more! Yeah, I feel the same way as you about people not sending out full emails and having to visit the site. To me it is just a way of forcing people to visit your site, just so the blogger can see a +1 in the statistics. You don’t make your readers happy with something like that…only yourself and that’s the wrong thing to do.
Apparently I don’t have a great system because I bookmarked this post a while back and only just now got to it. I mainly use WordPress’s feed to subscribe to blogs as well as Twitter where I follow the sites that interact with me the most. I honestly only read the posts that interest me which narrows the list down quite a bit to the movies I’m interested in, discussion topics, and the occasional random post, especially if it’s someone who recently found my own site.
No worries though, I keep having a huge backlog as well 😉
That’s a good choice, only reading what interest you. I usually skip reviews of new movies until I’ve seen it myself or reviews of movies I’m not that interested in. Discussion topics I’ll usually check out as well.. and visiting other people’s sites who have found yours is always a good idea.